and welcome back to the big picture i'm sam sax in for tom hartman coming up in this half hour as communities across america are forced to make crippling budget cuts public a lot of berries are often the first on budget chopping blocks but a staggering number of americans still feel that libraries are pillars of their communities so should we be doing more to protect them. and in the latest war on the middle class news new jersey governor chris christie vetoed a bill to raise the state's minimum wage today at the same time banks on wall street are richer than ever is it time we stop protecting america's billionaires and redistributed their wealth to those that need it the most.

right so i have a confession to make i haven't stepped foot in a public library in a really really long time i honestly can't remember the last time i was in one probably in college but it's been several several years but having said that i'm really glad that public libraries exist there's one just down the street from the t.v. studio here i haven't gone in it i haven't needed to but i'm glad it's there and not just for an astrologer reasons in fact i'm glad that all of the nearly one hundred forty thousand libraries in communities all across america are there there with shelves and shelves of actual physical books banks and computers in community seminars and workshops you see even though many are warning of the coming to demise of physical books libraries are just as important today as they've ever been in

fact over the past decade the number of visits to the library has doubled to one. point two billion per year and just last year more than half of all the public libraries in america reported increased usage of electronic resources computers and why five services the digital age hasn't killed the public library it's made the public library better that's especially true since thirty five percent of americans don't have high speed internet access in their homes and sixty two percent of all public libraries report they are that they are the only provider of free internet in their entire community so even though i'm not using libraries a lot of americans still are as they should be and as many need to be unfortunately public libraries are in trouble it's not the digital age that's killing them it's the austerity age fifty seven percent of all public libraries across america

reported decreased funding last year and for the third year in a row forty percent of all states in the nation cut their public library budgets as a result of these budget cuts almost half of all public libraries report that they have insufficient internet connection speeds now and more than two thirds of all public libraries report not having enough computers to keep up with public demand. public libraries which run on taxpayer dollars and don't generate profits are an easy target for austerity obsessed conservatives when you check out a book from the local library g.d.p. doesn't go up when you attend a seminar at the library a c.e.o. on wall street doesn't get a bonus check and the public library lobby in washington d.c. isn't exactly what you call a heavyweight in two thousand and twelve the american library association or the a l.a. spent one hundred seventy thousand dollars lobbying that actually sounds like a lot but it's not really it's just enough to rank the a.o.l.a.

eight hundred eighteen and center for responsive politics list of top spenders on lobbying in washington d.c. and the l a l a's one hundred seventy thousand dollars spent on lobbying in two thousand and twelve is nothing compared to the chamber of commerce's more than ninety five million dollars spent on lobbying last year or blue cross blue shield sixteen million dollars lobbying tab or general electric's fifteen million dollars spent on lobbying public libraries just don't get much respect in this town and that might explain why with the fiscal cliff looming a given a few months we hear all about the devastating cuts to defense and health care programs but yet we hear absolutely nothing about the nearly twenty million dollars that will be cut from federal programs that support public libraries across america and we hear nothing about the epidemic of library closings staff layoffs and our cut backs that are already plaguing communities all around the nation. we know

there's a huge disconnect between what our lawmakers are doing and what we actually want them to do for example most americans don't want social security and medicare cut yet that's what lawmakers are looking to do most americans want our wars abroad and yet they continue to get funded and most americans want action on climate change our lawmakers do nothing but one of the greatest discontents that no one is talking about is our national attitude toward public libraries and how our lawmakers are treating these institutions a new survey by the pew research center found that ninety one percent of americans felt that libraries are important to their community and another seventy six percent said that libraries are important to them personally and to their family so me not going to libraries i'm in the minority and during a time of massive joblessness in america libraries serve a critical role for communities providing help for job seekers workshops on resume

building and employment counseling so rather than cutting critical public library budgets should we be increasing public library budgets and recognizing the vital role they play in keeping communities educated informed and integrated let's have stephen c. like he's a conservative commentator and a pro business advocate david welcome back to the show thanks so much for coming on thanks for having me sam i'm very excited about being on with you know i hope tom's all right he's fine i mean i'm excited to you david so why do you hate books. you know very well i don't hate but i think all these are i very well why do you have a library of books well let's let's be very open in this discourse for your viewing audience it's not a stare at say from the republicans or even the democrats that has caused the demise of so many libraries it is mismanagement of the public funds they have been using this money for purposes that they were not designated for the. now we could

solve this quite literally overnight if we just would relax the rules that govern charitable giving unfortunately this administration has just kicked the public library system straight in the butt on january second president obama signed into law the american taxpayer relief act of two thousand and twelve and while that sounds really good the reality is it's the exact opposite of the title now people most people who make charitable contributions and corporations who would now they're already couldn't get it up to one hundred one so you're not doing what he lives in another three percent in other words we are depriving the libraries of charitable contributions now part of this provision that the president just signed into law was that let's say a corporation as a large book collection or an individual has a very large book collection if they contribute it to a library or

a school they can't deduct it so that in a particular you say david i office we don't you expect we need to rely on the billionaires to fund our libraries and taxpayers that we are going to say only in part my friends the other part is we need to demand financial accountability from our elected officials who are squandering your viewers monies away on all sorts of other things launch programs for illegal aliens any number of fritter and those poor children ok you know those poor children are going without books and most of them are inner city or in these rural areas they don't have the benefit of like a fancy private school you know you say david but here's a bit of back to the facts point to something else we've had double over the last ten years more people growing one point two billion people go to libraries more than all of the sporting events that people go to a joke right we guys all whine criticism elected officials squandering the money they're not scorning want to hear they're going to have to now we have libraries

that don't have enough computers that don't have the high speed access. to me this increased demand with more people going not because libraries have become obsolete now because billionaires are not giving enough books to libraries it's because forty percent of the states in the country for the third year in a row of reported that they're slashing library budgets yeah i agree with you sam and that's a disk race you know if you look at texas so there should be more money you're saying there should be more money in our library budget and i got to tell you you bring up a very good point about the computers part of the president's american taxpayer relief act to na is the contribution of computers schools and to libraries isn't that outrageous it answers your question but you know in texas a lot of good corporations have stepped in and they have been donating books and money to public libraries and against my strenuous objections sam a lot of those books are even in spanish because you know i feel that whole bilingual education has been a big hindrance for a lot of these young children in libraries are that actually they're undocumented immigrants you have to be careful they're just they're just patrolling on leverage

where you think you are you seem to say that library service still serve a very important role and the government shouldn't fund the no just a billionaire ship on them you have ten seconds on the last for david ten seconds ok thank you the government should continue to fund them but they should be good stewards of our money sam and let's not play partisan politics let's do this together all right david thank you so much for coming on but i do alpha doesn't end you to. just. now it's time for tonight's the good the bad and the very very really frag blissfully ugly the good the people of boulder area they were from a referendum to build a second nuclear power plant in the nation has failed since only twenty percent of eligible ball garion showed up to the polls to vote for the measure the referendum

failed to get the. number of votes needed to be mine did you see after the fukushima crisis in two thousand and eleven the world learned the nuclear power is a dangerous game of roll the dice it's not safe and any so-called industry expert or bought off politician who says we can safely store nuclear fuel and waste for tens of millions of years into the future is scamming us plain and simple good i'm bald area for realizing it and let's hope we americans realize that soon to. now the bad arizona state representative steve smith smith has introduced a bill that would require arizona hospital staff to confirm patients immigration status during check in or treatment and then immediately report those without proper documentation to an immigration officials and explaining his rationale for the bill smith argued that it was a hospital's civic duty to check the immigration status of its patients no actually steve it's the civic duty of immigration enforcement to check the status of

supposedly undocumented immigrants the civic duty of a hospital is to treat the sick and injured no matter who they are that's part of the deal of being a compassionate and healthy nation but in arizona if you're bleeding or in cardiac arrest make sure you remember your immigration papers before going to the hospital and now the very very ugly the gun lobby each year the gun lobby including groups like the n.r.a. the national shooting sports foundation spends millions of dollars on marketing guns and shooting sports but now a large portion of that money is being spent to market products to children new consumers right take for instance junior shooters a gun lobby supported magazine that seeks to get children interested in guns past additions of the magazine have featured articles titled glocks are for girls one edition even featured a cover image of a young girl smiling and holding on to a semiautomatic rifle like the bushmaster used to kill several young girls in

newtown after all if there's one way. stop a bad guy with a gun it's a seven year old girl with a bushmaster that is very very ugly. let me let me i want to know wouldn't let me ask you a question from. here on this network is what we have in the bank we have our knives out. the truth is this right it was just about staying there to get here in a situation where b. and i don't want me to talk about her name and me.

you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for langley is think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture. the worst journalistic. white house to give it to a radio guy. from a click. away to quote a good job because you never seen anything like that i'm cold.

sadly today as the english language mourns sarah palin is out at fox so-called news last friday real clear politics reported that box news has decided to part ways with the gubernatorial twitter turned political celebrity over the last three years she was paid she was a paid contributor earning roughly a million bucks a year a study of the university of minnesota analyzed playlands appearances on the network and concluded that between two thousand and ten and two thousand and twelve pale in smoke spoke his mind spoke nearly one hundred ninety thousand words on the

network do the math and it works out to her being paid roughly fifteen dollars and eighty five cents per word and that also includes some of those words that none of us have ever heard of before and don't appear in any english language dictionary like you betcha and refute it unclear where pailin in her vocabulary vocabulary go from here can i suggest the next. i want to tell you about two things going on right now near each other one in new york and one in new jersey first in new jersey today new jersey governor chris christie vetoed legislation passed out of the state senate to increase the minimum wage from seven twenty five an hour to eight fifty an hour christie claims that

paying working people in this state more money will hurt the recovery in new jersey a state where the unemployment rate of nine point six percent is well above the national unemployment rate but as the new jersey policy perspective fine. yes the exact opposite will actually happen the increase in the minimum wage would mean four hundred thirty nine million more dollars in the hands of working people in the state that would increase economic activity by two hundred seventy eight million dollars in the first year and any quibbling of two thousand four hundred twenty new full time jobs would be created but again governor christie vetoed it so working people they get screwed meanwhile across the border in new york where learning that billionaires on wall street have even more money and power in the market than previously believed new data from the dallas federal reserve shows that a small group of mega banks control upwards of seventy percent of all banking

assets in fact just twelve banks that's all just twelve banks or point two percent of all the commercial banks in operation have assets between two hundred fifty billion dollars and two point three trillion dollars and they account for sixty nine percent of the industry's total assets and this is five years after too big to fail was supposed to be done away with so here we have billionaire banks on wall street with unbelievable amounts of money yet working people in new jersey can't even get a modest pay increase and we wonder why our economy is so after up. luckily there's a really easy way to get things back on track and it has to do with outlawing billionaires in america and it's the subject of tonight's delete it. it's time we as a nation have a serious discussion about outlawing billionaires this week we learned that two

thousand and twelve was water hack of a year for the billionaires the one hundred richest people in the world got two hundred forty one billion dollars wealthier this year bringing the total net worth of not one point nine trillion dollars is one hundred people have more combined wealth than the entire g.d.p. of nations like italy or mexico or spain and australia but one hundred seventy other nations and billionaires just in the united states also had a field day as the annual forbes four hundred list of two thousand and twelve showed america's richest billionaires saw their wealth increase by two hundred billion dollars last year bringing their total net worth to one point seven trillion at the same time the economy here in the united states which is staring down a year of impending austerity is stagnant despite moderate unemployment and g.d.p. growth forty nine million americans still live in poverty forty six million

americans are on food stamps because they quite literally don't have enough money to feed their families the economic situation in europe continues to deteriorate and even emerging markets in asia are slowing down so if it were true that the world's economies rely on the super rich to do well as today's all of our conspired right wing economics and all in front and for them argue then why are the world's austerity economies doing so poorly. done is the answer it's because the billionaires are not the job creators you've been told there's somewhere between symbiotes and parasites not meant as a personal insult against billionaires many of them are very good and decent people but it's meant as a statement of common sense. if vast fortunes are being a hoarded in the hands of a very few people. people couldn't possibly spend that much money in their lifetime

or their kids a lifetime or even their kids' kids' kids lifetime. and that money is essentially being released. this is the point that billionaire nick hanauer was making in a recent ted talk explaining why rich people are not job creators. there could never be enough super rich people to power a great economy somebody like me makes hundreds or thousands of times as much as the median american but i don't buy hundreds or thousands of times as much stuff my family owns three cars not three thousand i buy a few pairs of pants and shirts a year like most american men occasionally we go out to eat with friends i can't buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed americans can't buy any new cars any clothes or enjoy any meals out wages are a key point too it's no coincidence that the explosion of billionaires in america has corresponded with the flat lining of workers' wages for most of american

history workers' wages grew as their productivity grew as was virtually considered a law of economics so much so that at nineteen sixty six time magazine in an article titled the futurists looking toward eighty two thousand predicted a coming leisure society in which workers would benefit from increased productivity as a result of automation and technology and see their wages increase continue to increase despite working fewer and fewer hours because they would be more productive in those hours right around the time the corporate leaders saw their income tax rates slash dramatically by the reagan administration and began looking overseas for cheaper and cheaper labor a giant gap opened up between productivity at red line going up and workers' wages their green line flat flat lining their productivity went up considerably this time . magazine predicted but wages flattened the leisure society for the middle class

began to die and in its place the billionaire class came into being as corporate leaders sucked more and more wealth from their now far more productive workforce while refusing to share any of those gains for the fruit of those productivity gains with their workers or with their community after all with a new low personal income tax rates is a lot more incentive for executives just keep the cash rather than pay their workers well as a result the typical hourly wage wage for an american worker has increased a measly dollar twenty three an hour over the last thirty six years after accounting for inflation meanwhile the top one percent have seen their incomes increase by two hundred seventy five percent since reagan selection today workers' wages as a percentage of g.d.p. are at an all time low yet corporate profits as a percentage of g.d.p.

are at an all time high and now with the top one percent of americans owning more wealth than a third of the entire nation and the bottom fifty percent of americans own only three percent of our nation's wealth. we as a nation are facing levels of inequality that we have never seen before in american history. this is the price we as a nation are pain for letting billionaire funded think tanks billionaire funded lobbyists convince us and convince congress to move to low tax rates so-called free trade policies and deregulation particularly deregulation of the financial industry this defies both history logic and sanity. imagine walking into a classroom of kindergartners and finding that just one kid has nearly all the toys all the toys just one kid as thousands of toy cars army men and building blocks piled up like uncle scrooge his money been. filling half the classroom one or two

kids have a couple of dozen toys over the side and one kid has an all or rag doll but nobody could possibly think that you know one kid having all this stuff. and then all the other kids having this actually most of them have been just that but that's a healthy way to distribute. for a society to distribute toys to kindergarten classes that one kid could even play with just. so why would we call that kid a toy creator why would we tell all the other kindergartners that they can only play with toys when that one student decides to share them. and i think we do that but that's exactly what we do with billionaires in our economy. billionaires who can spend all the money they have in our more and more reluctant to invest that money in their workers their businesses and their communities. so what good are they. it's time to put in place a new wealth tax in america i propose

a one hundred percent tax on all wealth over one billion dollars hopefully news busters jack coleman who seem so offended by this idea when i talk about it my radio show didn't just have his head explode but seriously if you can't get by on a thousand million dollars you probably shouldn't have access to that much money in the first place there's nobody who can't make it on a billion dollars so any wealth over a billion dollars one hundred percent of it goes to help the rest of the country have a decent life that money can live forty nine million americans out of poverty move the forty six million americans on food stamps into the middle class they will those people now moved into the middle class by the invisible hand of human instinct and need better know how to spend the money and thus generate demand and economic activity than does the billionaire class which currently has much of their

excess trillions stashed in offshore bank accounts this wealth tax would also break up giant monopolies and open up the market for small businesses we shouldn't rely just on the bain capital's and the koch brothers to start or buy up new businesses the riches of the billionaire class or redistributed a word progressive should embrace by the way redistribution that more and more americans could have access to start up capital and actually earn a living as entrepreneurs trust me the billionaires can spare the wealth total of the average american family is fifty seven thousand dollars. that's wealth not income what they own convert that into hundred dollar bills and it's a stack about two inches tall but the average wealth through the average wealth of billionaires on the forbes four hundred list is four point two billion dollars convert that into a stack of hundred dollar bills and it would reach over two miles into the sky it would be a navigation risk to aircraft so i have to start funneling the riches produced by

the american economy to the real job creators working class people who are spending money and the best way to do that is to outlaw billionaires with one hundred percent wealth tax on all assets over a billion dollars we call it the no billionaires campaign that just might be our best hope to save the american middle class. more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images and seeing from the streets of canada. operations are.

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